While the Magento architecture is very flexible and powerful, it requires more resources to maintain this flexibility. However, it does not mean that Magento can’t be responsive. We’ll show you what to look our for, as well as some tips and tricks to achieve the best performance from your Magento server.
If you set up and optimize your website properly and invest in quality web hosting, you can achieve a high-performance Magento store. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. We’ll also show you what you should focus on when choosing a Magento hosting provider.
Magento is an e-commerce solution that helps you build and grow an online store. As one of the most popular open e-commerce systems around the world, Magento operates using MySQL as its database server and PHP for its backend programming language, along with some Zend Framework elements.
Used by small and large companies alike, Magento has the ability to be enhanced by thousands of extensions and themes that can make your web store truly unique. For example, leveraging a Magento eCommerce extension can significantly boost your store’s functionality and sales potential.
If you run a Magento e-commerce store, you probably have realized that hosting is not an easy task for your Magento e-commerce store.
Because of this, choosing a quality Magento host and environment is important to get the Magento hosting experience that you would expect. You might be aware that many hosting providers meet the minimum requirements for hosting the Magento store. Let’s dive into the list of important things to consider when choosing a Magento host.
Table of Contents
1. Operating Systems
Which operating system is better for Magento Hosting: Linux, or Windows? This is really a very important question.
Most web hosting providers provide either Linux or Windows server hosting. The type of operating system you need depends on what kind of language and database you plan to use with your website.
Linux is a command-line operating system and everything on it, including PHP should (and almost always does) work better on Linux. Linux is a free and secure operating system and provides ready-to-use software to power your website.
You should only choose a Windows operating system if you have a very specific reason to do so. For example, if you plan to use ASP or ASP.NET on your site. Otherwise, the more popular and affordable Linux 64-bit option is probably best for you.
Linux distributors such as CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian are very suitable for hosting PHP + MySQL based websites such as Magento.
2. Memory Requirement
As for the memory requirement, the Magento store is quite RAM dependent. RAM is the first thing you should look into when setting up Magento. How much RAM is needed to host a Magento website depends on many factors, such as average monthly traffic, number of products, the performance you want to achieve, and more.
If you don’t know, a great balanced setup would be a server with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM, as well as SSD or NVMe storage – this should keep your Magento instance running smoothly for a long time.
3. Composer (latest stable version)
Composer is a package manager for the PHP programming language. It is used for managing PHP dependencies and any required libraries. It is used by developers to contribute to the Magento “codebase” or build their own “extensions”. It is also used to manage Magento components and their dependencies.
Installing Magento software using Composer provides the following advantages:
- Repackage Magento with other components.
- Upgrade Magento and all third-party extensions.
- Reduce extension conflicts and compatibility issues.
- Reuse third-party libraries without bundling them with source code.
4. Web Servers
Magento supports the Nginx and Apache web servers. Magento provides an Nginx sample configuration file and an Apache .htaccess file. The Nginx configuration file contains all settings for better performance. Some of them are listed below:
- Settings for content compression.
- Memory and execution time settings for PHP.
- Settings for caching the static content in a web browser.
5. Database
Magento uses a database for storing data and indexes. The latest version of Magento 2.4 is compatible with database servers such as MySQL 5.6 and 5.7, MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.*, MariaDB 10.0/10.1/10.2, Percona 5.7 and other binary-compatible MySQL technologies.
Among all databases, MySQL (or MariaDB) is best for Magento as it is quite easy to configure and optimize.
6. PHP
The latest version of Magento 2.4 is compatible with PHP versions 7.4.x. It can work with 7.3.x as well, but it is currently untested. It also requires the following PHP extensions:
- ext-bcmath
- ext-ctype
- ext-curl
- ext-dom
- ext-gd
- ext-hash
- ext-iconv
- ext-intl
- ext-mbstrin
- ext-openssl
- ext-pdo_mysql
- ext-simplexml
- ext-soap
- ext-xsl
- ext-zip
- lib-libxml
You should also enable the PHP OPcache for better performance and configure the memory limit setting in the PHP configuration file to avoid common problems while using Magento.
7. SSL Certificate
Magento does not support self-signed SSL certificates. It supports a valid security certificate for HTTPS and Transport Layer Security.
Magento is an e-commerce store, so you should use an SSL Certificate to protect the data and transactions for your customers. The SSL certificate is very important for your Magento site. It’s there to make sure that all data goes through a secure connection between the server and the website. As a result, buyers will feel more secure shopping on your online store, hence this increases the conversion rate.
Optional Requirements:
1. Caching (Redis, Varnish)
Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a cache or temporary storage location so that they can be accessed more quickly. Caching is an effective way to improve Magento performance. With caching, you can store the data for future retrieval, speed up future requests, and mask poorly optimized code.
If you are deploying a large Magento store, you should use Redis or Varnish for your caches. You should keep the following principles in mind while configuring caching for Magento:
- You should configure Varnish cache with enough memory to hold your most popular pages in memory.
- You should configure a session cache using a separate instance of Redis. Memory configuration for this cache type should consider the site’s cart abandonment strategy and how long a session should expect to remain in the cache.
- You should configure a Redis cache with enough memory to hold all other caches in memory for optimal performance. Block cache is a very important factor in determining the amount of memory to configure. This will grows relative to the number of pages on a site.
- You should also configure a Redis cluster to perform parallel read/write operations. This will increase the number of nodes automatically.
2. Search Engines (Elasticsearch, etc..)
By default, Magento uses MySQL to perform all search operations. It is recommended to use Elasticsearch as a more optimized search solution.
Elasticsearch allows you to improve the default Magento search engine. Elasticsearch has an ability to scale when you experience increased loads on your Magento store. After configuring Elasticsearch, the time for query processing will not change with the growth of search results.
Magento Commerce version 2.3.x supports the following Elasticsearch versions:
- Elasticsearch 7.x.x
- Elasticsearch 6.8.x
Additionally, Magento 2.4 now solely uses Elasticsearch as its search engine, and is now a prerequisite for installing Magento 2.4 and later. It’s a superior search engine system that has no downsides.
Conclusion
In the above guide, we learned about different Magento requirements before deploying it in the production environment.
There’s no doubt that Magento is one of the best (if not the best) e-commerce platform. However, to get the most out of it, you have to install and configure it properly on the server and meet all of Magento’s requirements. Fulfill the above Magento requirements and boost the performance of your e-commerce store. It is highly recommended that you use the latest Magento 2.4 version for your e-commerce store as it is beneficial for your business as well as providing enhanced security.
All of these tips and suggestions can take a long time to implement. If you use our managed Magento hosting however, we can easily and quickly implement all of these suggestions for you so that your server can perform at insane speeds with many concurrent visitors. However, we don’t limit your access – you get full control over the server as well as access to the root account. Focus on your business while we take care of the rest.
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